I grew up with fairly serious medical problems and got called "brave" and so forth all the time.

It was deeply patronising and people being overly-nice to me due to illnesses actually really, really fucked my head up quite badly to the point where I felt like people were only being nice to me at all due to the medical problems and didn't really like me at all.

Given the choice between being insulted and having the piss taken out of you or having people being patronising and over-sympathetic, the former is actually a far less damaging way to treat people.

but I can barely remember them now. However, as you say, there are lots of findings in the nursing literature about how psychological styles and that directly impact mortality (the most interesting being spirituality; spiritual people live longer).

BUT if I remember those specific papers correctly, this whole emotional projection thing (calling ill people brave, battling against cancer, etc) may not be a good thing at all: although you're calling such people brave, fighters, etc, they don't feel like that at all. Often ill people are terribly depressed and anxious; so saying this stuff just feels completely incongruent.

but if someone is suffering from a very serious illness and still manages to smile sometimes, they're facing the thing most people are scared of most (death) and still battling on - hence being brave. I'd love to be called brave (without the ill stuff to go with it)....

It's coping but being able to cope has got nothing to do with qualities of bravery or courage. It all ties back to this idea that there's a "weakness" in any kind of mental illness or anxiety - implying people who cope are brave implies people who struggle to come to terms with a life-threatening illness are cowardly. And when you realise that's entirely untrue you realise it by logical extension can't be true that people who do come to terms with it are brave.